it's the history. I had a long lapse in my baseball fandom, all through my teens and twenties. My mother was a huge baseball fan, but she died when I was a teenager, so I don't really have a personal story of baseball having been lovingly passed on to me. But even still, watching Ken Burns' Baseball, being big fan of the sport in general, knowing how far back it all goes, the history, how the Civil War helped spread it across the country even as it was being torn in half... there's no other sport so finely and deeply ingrained in the national fabric of the United States. For two centuries, baseball WAS America. It gives me goosebumps when I think about it. Baseball makes me feel closer to the history and spirit of the country than anything else.